In his book Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love

the Fifties, the film writer Peter Biskind explains how analysts took over from the
police in the Fifties movie plot. He describes an Otto Preminger film, Whirlpool,
in which a hypnotist played by Jose Ferrer convinces his patient, Gene Tierney,
that she has committed a murder. 'Luckily for Tierney,' Biskind writes, 'she's
married to a prominent psychiatrist, who realises that Ferrer is the killer, not
his wife. Where are the cops? Out giving traffic tickets.'

This shift is best represented in Hitchcock's Spellbound, made in 1945, with famous
dream sequences designed by Salvador Dalí. The film opens with some prefatory
remarks: 'Our story deals with psychoanalysis,' the solemn titles read, 'the method
by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst
seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the
locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient
are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the
devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.'

And indeed, Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish Sherlock Holmes, works out that amnesiac
Gregory Peck has not in fact committed the murder he has developed a guilt complex
about. But even in such a serious thriller about 'the devils of unreason', there
was still a little room left for the sceptics. In a gag worthy of Groucho Marx, a
nymphomaniac patient complains that she thinks 'this whole thing's ridiculous'.
'What whole thing?' asks Bergman, her analyst. 'Psychoanalysis,' replies the
nymphomaniac. 'It bores the pants off me.'

The way was paved for Woody Allen, who scripted his first film, What's New,
Pussycat?, in 1965. It featured Peter Sellers as a Viennese-accented cod-Freudian
with a long black wig and glasses. From then on, it seems, cine-shrinks never
looked back. Only last month, Nanni Moretti, dubbed 'the Italian Woody Allen', won
the Palme d'Or at Cannes, for a film in which he plays a psychoanalyst whose life
of witticisms receives a tragic jolt. That film, La Stanza del Figlio, will have
its British premiere at the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival.

At least since the Seventies, film theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Christian
Metz have used psychoanalysis to interpret movies, applying its tools to both
content and form. The title of trendy philosopher Slavoj Zizek's 1992 edition of
essays brilliantly evokes the fusion of the two disciplines: Everything You Always
Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). In 1974, Christian
Metz wrote in his seminal book Psychoanalysis and Cinema that he hoped this
interpretative arrangement might some day be reciprocal. Yet it still remains
unclear how film, or film theory, might influence the practice of psychoanalysis.
Andrea Sabbadini says that the cinema's effect is 'indirect', and that analysts who
write about film do so almost as a hobby, something that is detached from the daily
business of the talking cure.

That's not to say, however, that psychoanalysts are not affected by films the way
anyone else might be. Alain de Mijolla, who will be chairing a panel at the
festival, believes that the experience of seeing a particular film as a child
subliminally influenced his later decision to become an analyst.

Mijolla was six when, just before the Second World War broke out, he was taken to
see a rather gruelling film because it starred his then hero, Maurice Chevalier.
Later on, he had no memory of its content, a form of forgetfulness so intense, he
says, that it should be 'referred to rather as a repression'. Several decades
later, he saw the movie on television. Chevalier plays a man unjustly accused of a
series of murders. The real killer is found out on the basis of psychological
interrogation by the police. At one point, the assassin says to the detective:
'Have you read Freud?' Mijolla realised that 'a memory trace - the result of an
entertaining film - had been engraved 30 years earlier in the unconscious of a
child who was to become a psychoanalyst'.

Perhaps fror some the cinema always brings childhood experiences to mind. Bernardo
Bertolucci thinks of the movie theatre as an 'amniotic darkness... like a womb'.
Andrea Sabbadini thinks that seeing a film 'is similar to what happens in
psychoanalysis' - for a brief period, you are taken outside of your world, outside
of real time, to a place where entire lives can pass by in a matter of minutes.
'And then of course we have to emerge from it,' he says. 'We leave the session or
the cin ema, and have to be careful crossing the road.'

Sabbadini adds that there can be something 'regressive' about spending too much
time in the cinema. 'People who hide in the dark of a cinema for hours a day are
certainly trying to avoid something about reality outside the cinema,' he says.
'There's an element of addiction which is close to being pathological.' He is
describing the habits of at least one young boy, who later told an interviewer that
'I constantly escaped into the cinema... You would leave your poor house behind and
all your problems with school and family and you would go into the cinema and there
they would have penthouses and white telephones and the women were lovely and the
men always had an appropriate witticism to say and things were funny, but they
always turned out well, and the heroes were genuine heroes and it was just great.'

But reality never lives up to the movies. That boy grew up to be Woody Allen, a man
who must have spent at least as much of his life in psychoanalysis as he has in the
cinema, and the man who, more than anyone else, made shrinks famous on film.

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